TL;DR. I’m okay. Not getting any more work done, but I feel like, maybe, I will soon. The endless craving to post is gone. Or rather, this posting is enough.
I’ve been off Facebook, my biggest issue, for almost seven weeks now. There are people there I miss, but then, I miss everything. I never let go of anything.
My parents, the family I grew up in, my kid’s childhoods, playing in the parks, my early romance. The career I hated when I was making a ton of money in the bubble, nervously playing the role of an adult. The drudgery of temping after college. Our first shitty apartment with no garbage disposal and the room air-conditioner that sounded like a helicopter landing. Without a vacuum cleaner, I damp mopped our single rug to remove thick matts of cat hair, which I peeled off with my fingers.
I miss my high-school friends who were also my college friends because I made no friends in college. I miss my former writing workshops.
An ex-girlfriend who I feared might be dead for various reasons gave a speech at a conference a few weeks back, that I found on Youtube, which was a relief. She was fine. She was ignoring my contact attempts–not dead or demented. And she should ignore me. I should mean nothing to her now, or less than nothing.
I could hear the nineteen year old I knew, in the voiceover of the powerpoint deck, the voice the same, but different, more confident, maybe, so confident. I’m not even a speck in her rear view mirror.
Good.
Let go.
This goes beyond addiction and productivity. Beyond living intentionally. Something deeper. Unresolved.
I love the noise of the party because it drowns something intolerable out.
Go back to any party you like, as long as it’s not the Republican Party.
Oh, you mean Facebook? Funny, I don’t think of that as a party. Online hellscape, maybe.
I have carefully purged from my friends people who disagree with me on the basics, no subhumans are allowed, so it’s a place where I can talk about stuff, and people wander in and out of the threads as they see fit. Like in a party where you can have a conversation, and then disengage and go have another conversation.
Set comments to friends only, get rid of people that annoy you, and the only hell you bring with you is your own.
Sounds like you haven’t finished your fast and yet you’ve already decided Facebook isn’t such a bad place.
The FB fast started 3 weeks early, so I’m at 6 weeks and change there.
The problem is FB is a time suck, the company is evil, and the politics is distracting, (which is time suck). The proximity of adrenaline inducing interactions with idiots in friends feeds is there, too, though I block them as they come up.
If my life was infinite, I might just keep at it, doing my work as I felt like it; life isn’t infinite; I have to figure out what is the most bang for the buck, time wise. Because I am not drawn to do what I most want to be doing in a weird way that is hard to explain. I guess it’s called procrastination. But it’s more than t hat.
Is my idealized concept of my own identity the root problem? If I fix it do I stop worrying about… a lot… and all such things as this are ridiculous? What is a behavioral addiction really? It is defined as something that ‘interferes with your life,’ in some negative way. Were my parents addicted to alcohol? They succeeded wildly at their lives drinking every damn night.
I have my one friend who is really driven, and she also beats herself up too much. I want to tell her to relax. She’s going to be fine, but I don’t know her financial situation well… she’s all in.
I like the idea of being all in, I always have, the idea of life as this headlong dive into some passion. The bipolar makes that headlong dive hypomanic. The crash from that depressing. And of course, work-life balance.
Which again is a value judgement. Are olympic athletes all mentally ill? Should we pity them?
I think as a writer I’m drawn to these existential issues, or I write because I am, but they are tail swallowing.
I had that experience recently, the long-out-of-touch ex on a YouTube video. I enjoyed her talk, considered reaching out, let her go. There’s something reassuring about knowing people are still alive, doing well…but not having to engage.